Tag: Jeff Bezos

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Blue Origin’s first launch customer: Eutelsat

Jeff Bezos and Rodolphe Belmer
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon as well as the Blue Origin space venture, takes the stage with Eutelsat CEO Rodolphe Belmer. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos revealed satellite operator Eutelsat as the first paying customer for his Blue Origin space venture’s New Glenn orbital rocket, and showed off a new animation depicting the rocket taking off, delivering a satellite to orbit and landing on a barge at sea.

Bezos and the chairman of this week’s Satellite 2017 conference, Jeffrey Hill, brought the Paris-based satellite operator’s CEO, Rodolphe Belmer, on stage as a surprise guest during today’s keynote chat.

“We couldn’t hope for a better first partner,” Bezos said.

In a news release, Eutelsat said the first payload would be a geostationary satellite, to be launched in the 2021-2022 time frame.

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Jeff Bezos shows off shiny new rocket engine

BE-4 engine
Blue Origin employees move the BE-4 engine through the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash. (Blue Origin Photo via Jeff Bezos / Twitter)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is providing a sneak peek at his Blue Origin space venture’s BE-4 rocket engine, which could someday help power missions to the moon.

Today’s preview tweets comes a day before Bezos is expected to update his vision for commercial space missions at the Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, D.C. The BE-4 engine, fueled by liquefied natural gas, is expected to play a key role in that vision.

Bezos announced that the first BE-4 has been built at Blue Origin’s production facility in Kent, Wash., and the second and third are “following close behind.”

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Blue Origin proposes moon delivery in 2020

Image: Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos shows off the concept for Blue Origin’s launch system during a 2015 news conference in Florida. The rocket could reportedly be adapted for moon missions. (Blue Origin photo)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has reportedly proposed sending a robotic lander to the moon’s south polar region by 2020, as an initial step toward an “Amazon-like” lunar delivery system and eventually a permanently inhabited moon base.

Blue Origin’s white paper is described in a report from The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos.

The Post says the company’s seven-page proposal, dated Jan. 4, has been circulating among NASA’s leadership and President Donald Trump’s transition team. It’s only one of several proposals aimed at turning the focus of exploration beyond Earth orbit to the moon and its environs during Trump’s term.

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Blue Origin has big plans for expansion at HQ

Blue Origin factory
Hardware is spread across the New Shepard assembly area. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has out-of-this-world ambitions – with expansion plans to match.

Permit filings at the city of Kent, Wash., reveal plans for a 236,000-square-foot warehouse complex and 102,900 square feet of office space, southwest of Blue Origin’s current 300,000-square-foot headquarters and rocket production facility in an industrial area of the city.

Last year, Blue Origin purchased a 120,000-square-foot warehouse building across the street from its headquarters to support the production of the company’s BE-3 and BE-4 rocket engines, as well as its New Shepard suborbital boosters and crew capsules.

“When we go to the next step with our next rocket, we’re going to use that building as a bigger facility for production,” the Puget Sound Business Journal quoted Blue Origin’s president, Rob Meyerson, as saying.

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Buzz Aldrin visits Jeff Bezos’ rocket factory

Bezos and Aldrin
Jeff Bezos, Buzz Aldrin and the moonwalker’s son, Andrew Aldrin, are front and center in this picture taken at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. Buzz Aldrin’s longtime assistant, Christina Korp, is to the right and behind Andrew Aldrin. (Blue Origin Photo via Twitter)

It’s been a good week for Blue Origin, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture. Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin just paid a visit to the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and today the team behind Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship won one of the space industry’s most prestigious prizes.

Aldrin dropped by only a couple of days after starring in a New York fashion show, and in a picture that Bezos tweeted today, it looks as if the 87-year-old space icon is wearing the same T-shirt. Aldrin is the guy standing in the front row between his son, aerospace executive Andrew Aldrin, and Bezos himself.

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What it’ll be like to ride Blue Origin’s rocket

An artist’s conception shows passengers looking through one of the windows in Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. (Blue Origin Illustration)
An artist’s conception shows passengers looking through one of the windows in Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. (Blue Origin Illustration)

The folks who ride New Shepard, the suborbital spaceship being tested by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, will be given barf bags to tuck into their flight suits. But they almost certainly won’t need them.

That’s the word from former NASA astronaut Nicholas Patrick, who is now working out what passengers aboard New Shepard will experience. His official title at Blue Origin is human integration architect.

Patrick and other Blue Origin employees showed off what the company’s done so far, and what it plans to do over the next couple of years, for a standing-room crowd of about 500 folks on Jan. 27 during an “Astronomy on Tap” presentation at the Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.

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Jeff Bezos gives a boost to his rocket engine

Ox Boost Pump
An employee works on the BE-4 Ox Boost Pump prior to engine installation. (Blue Origin Photo)

And now for something completely different from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos: His latest mass email isn’t about jobs, or Donald Trump, or his new D.C. digs. It’s about a rocket engine boost pump.

Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, which he founded more than 16 years ago, is in the midst of building a next-generation rocket engine fueled by liquefied natural gas, known as the BE-4. Today, Bezos lifted the curtain on one of the engine’s subassemblies and highlighted how Blue Origin is using 3-D printing.

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Amazon wins share of Golden Globes spotlight

Jeff Bezos at Golden Globes
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughs during the Golden Globes, with supporting-actor nominee Simon Helberg at left and presenter Matt Damon at right. (NBC / Golden Globes via YouTube)

Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is becoming a regular at Hollywood award ceremonies like tonight’s Golden Globes, and now he’s becoming an inspiration for the jokes as well.

Bezos is attending the free-wheeling festivities by virtue of the 11 nominations that Amazon Studios picked up this year, including five for its TV shows and five more for “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon-backed theatrical release. Another movie with an Amazon connection, “The Salesman,” was up for best foreign-language film.

One of the video productions, “Goliath,” picked up a best-actor award early in the evening for Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of a washed-up lawyer trying to redeem himself. Toward the end of the show, “Manchester” star Casey Affleck won the Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic movie.

But for Bezos, the biggest nod of the night may well be the joke that Golden Globes host Jimmy Fallon shot his way.

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Jeff Bezos casts vote for space superhighway

Jeff Bezos and Alan Boyle
Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos chats with GeekWire’s Alan Boyle at the 2016 Space Symposium in Colorado, with a picture of Blue Origin’s New Shepard passenger capsule displayed in the background. (Tom Kimmell Photography / Courtesy of the Space Foundation)

What should Donald Trump have NASA do? Today Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos voiced his support for the idea that the space agency should help build a “highway in the sky” analogous to the interstate highway system that President Dwight Eisenhower ramped up in the 1950s.

The backing came in the form of an eight-word tweet, accompanied by a link to an article by Howard Bloom appearing in Salon (and as a guest blog posting on Scientific American’s website as well).

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John Glenn’s parting words to Jeff Bezos

Image: Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos shows off the concept for Blue Origin’s launch system during a 2015 news conference in Florida. Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is headquartered in Kent, Wash. (Blue Origin photo)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos accepted yet another award tonight for his Blue Originspace effort, but the prize he treasured the most is no doubt an accompanying letter from space hero John Glenn, who passed away 10 days after writing it.

The letter, dated Nov. 28, was made public as Bezos received a Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award tonight in Washington, D.C. The first African-American woman to fly in space, Mae Jemison, read Glenn’s tribute to Bezos at the ceremony – only hours after Glenn died in an Ohio hospital.

Blue Origin has successfully sent its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship to outer space and back five times, duplicating Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard’s ride. And it’s gearing up to build New Glenn rockets that will send spacecraft into orbit, just as Glenn went into orbit in 1962.

Glenn wrote that he was “deeply touched” to have a rocket named after him.

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